A car seat for a toddler, that is an infant capable of holding his or her head up, normally rests on a vehicle seat with the child facing forward. In a standard such arrangement the vehicular seat belt, which has ends fastened, relative to the forward travel direction, below and behind the vehicle seat, is used to secure the toddler seat in place on the car seat and to secure the child in the seat.
Seats of the Kolcraft.TM., Hi-Rider.TM., Quikstep.TM., Commander.TM., and Voyager.TM. type have a base which sits atop the vehicle seat and a pair of sides or arms that flank the child's pelvis. A shield member is either pivoted at the front of the base between the child's legs or at one of the sides and overlies the base atop the arms, confining the child in the seat. The belt is closed over this shield member to hold the toddler seat on the vehicle seat and to hold the shield member down atop the sides. Such an arrangement has the disadvantage that it cannot be adjusted for infants of different sizes so that small children are loosely confined in the device while large children are too tightly confined. Furthermore, such systems cannot be used without the shield member, as would be convenient with larger children.
In German patent document No. 3,019,153 filed May 20, 1980 by H. Engelhardt a head support is provided which is usable with a pivotal arm rest to form a toddler seat. The head support is downwardly and rearwardly U-shaped and is provided with a pair of downwardly projecting mounting pins that can fit either in a pair of holes in the top of the seat back for use as a head rest or in any two holes of two rows of holes formed in the top of the pivoted-down arm rest. The pins have vertically offset notches that can coact with catches in the arm rest to allow the vertical position of the device to be adjusted. Although such an arrangement does provide for adjustment both in the travel direction and vertically, it requires that the positions be set each time the child is loaded into the seat, that is the arm rest must be pivoted down, the child positioned on it, the pins inserted in the right holes, the device pushed down to the desired height, and the seat belt looped around it. Obviously this is a fairly onerous procedure which discourages use of the appliance. Furthermore the device is not very solidly anchored, so that it can work loose, particularly when worn, and can come violently apart in a crash.
A simpler system is described in European patent application No. 83,400,943-Al. Here the device is basically formed as a miniseat that sits atop the vehicle seat. The existing seat belt is threaded through guide passages in the arms of this seat and itself serves to hold the child in place. Basically all this device does is elevate the child. The disadvantage of such an arrangement is that it is not usable when the latch of the belt is too high so that it cannot be threaded through the guides, and it also can only accommodate fairly large children.